My iPhone app ( http://myallo.com/hotlist currently waiting for Apple approval to go into the App Store) periodically wants to tell Twitter the user's location. If the user is in motion, and the app is open, as often as every 5 minutes. But it doesn't want to tweet it ("I'm here", "Now I'm here", "Now I'm here"). That would be... bad. So I'll still want to put it in the user profile.
There are two other things. A question and a suggestion: Will every tweet include a location? My app is, most of the time, only interested in seeing a friend's location and most recent last tweet. It would be great if I could do this in one call (and greater if I could ask about several friends at once). If a user is only putting a location in the profile, will this location be sent along with each tweet? Locations have no security. It's the first, second, and third thing every single person wants to know about my app: "Who can see me, who can I see, what about stalkers?" PEople are very security oriented when it comes to location, rightly so. Currently with Twitter I work around this by having the app optionally post approximate coordinates. But a level of security would be great, and I think necessary to make geolocation successful and popular. For example take a look at brightkite.com. They have three levels of people: "The public", friends, and trusted friends. For each of those, you can set See my exact location, see only the city I'm in, or see nothing. That's really useful. For Twitter, it might be relatively easy to add a flag saying Only people I follow can see my location, and/or only followers can see my location. And/or you could have a list of users who could see my location. On Aug 31, 11:44 am, Raffi Krikorian <ra...@twitter.com> wrote: > part of our hopes when we designed the geolocation API is that people > can start putting their profile location (user.location) back to > something "useful" (e.g. mine could say "san francisco, ca") because > the specific location can be added as metadata to each tweet. > > what we're hoping for is that the user.location becomes something that > describes the user, and not the tweet. the geolocation API is for > describing the tweet. > do you have any suggestions as to what sorts of gotcha's we should > look out for?
